Salvation Boulevard (22 page)

“Do you know much about her?”

“Not a lot.”

“Could you do me a favor? Get her address and phone and such for me. Even ask around if anything's up with her.”

“Is she the runaway?”

“No. But she might have something to do with it. But she might not. And if I start asking around, people will immediately make more of it than maybe they should. I don't want that to happen. For a bunch of reasons. So don't say anything to anyone. Just, you know, ‘What's up with Nicole? Is she ever going to show up for rehearsals?' Just casual, normal, alright?”

“Of course. I can do that. I've been dying to play PI with you. But I have to take Angie for her checkup tomorrow.”

“Oh, let me do it. I have to go downtown anyway. It's practically on the way. I can drop her off, take care of my business, and then pick her up. Give me a chance to spend time with her.”

“That's a good idea. I'm glad you want to do that.”

“Me too,” I said.

“What do you have to do downtown?”

“William Thatcher Grantham III of Grantham, Glume, Wattly, and Goldfarb called to inform me that my services are no longer needed. I mean on the Nazami thing. It was Manny's case, and they're dropping it. I have to give them my final bill. I figured it would be better to, you know, drop by, remind them that I'm friendly and useful. They pay top dollar.”

“But you're done working on it?”

“I don't have a client,” I said.

“What if his new lawyer wants you to keep on it?”

“He's gonna get a court-appointed,” I said with a shrug. We don't have public defenders here. The court appoints from a pool of lawyers willing to work for $35 an hour, $45 an hour in court. The quality of their work is related to the rate of compensation. People who know defense lawyers just from TV and books—super clever, fully strategic, with knowledge of the law, doing research and calling experts—have no idea of what the realities are. Most of those guys handle a case the way a cook at McDonald's assembles your order, except if you asked them to hold the onions, they'd screw it up.

If your life depends on it, rob a liquor store so you can pay a good lawyer.

Indigent defendants are entitled to a defense. To do that adequately, if the facts are at all in question, means they are entitled to an investigator too. In recognition of that reality, the state will pay for one. The state has set our compensation rate at $10 an hour. You can do better working at a Cumberland Farms convenience store. At least that
comes with benefits, sick days, unemployment insurance, and worker's comp.

There are some old guys who have full pensions from something else and do a decent job. But I can't afford government wages. With one exception: working as a licensed crime scene investigator, which I am. That comes under the expert witness category, and the rate is $125 an hour. And that's just fine. But that wasn't what was at issue in the Nazami case.

“I mean, even if I were willing to work on it, who would pay me?” I asked. An excellent point. Who was going to pay me? “So that's it. Kid meets with his new lawyer, five, ten minutes maybe. Lawyer calls the DA. They make the deal. And it's all over. It's gone and we can all forget about it.”

I was headed down the interstate with Angie beside me.

I asked her who her favorite friends were in school. She named them, and I asked her what they were like. Her best friend, Cynthia, had started getting into trouble, challenging the teachers about biblical things. Her latest offense was passing around a list of the sex stories in the Bible. How Abraham passed off his wife as his sister and let other men marry her—twice! And the one about Lot and his daughters. My daughter couldn't bring herself to say more than that since the story is that each of them, in turn, got their father drunk and then went and had sex with him and even got pregnant by him.

“And she even said,” Angie was letting me in on something shocking, “that marriage in the Bible is not between one man and one woman. It's between one man and as many as he can get.”

“Well,” I said. “Well. Hmmm. Is she in a lot of trouble for that?”

“Yea-ahhh.”

“Making her parents crazy, is she?”

“Yea-ahhh.”

“Any other signs of rebellion in the ranks?” I asked.

“Dress code,” she said, nodding wisely, as if to say, what can you expect from adolescent girls?

“Um,” I said.

Then she said, “Thanks, Dad.”

“For what?”

“Saying you would take me with you to work.”

“Hey, I'm looking forward to it,” I said. “But you may find it boring.”

“That's okay.”

We were close enough, and the moment was relaxed enough, that I decided to talk about something difficult that had been on my mind. “Your, um, mother . . . Jeanette.”

“She's not my mother. Gwen's my mother.”

“Yeah, well, you're lucky I guess. You sort of get to choose your mother.”

“I choose Gwen.”

“That's fine. And I agree with that.”

“Good,” she said, her mouth set with unarguable certainty.

“But Jeanette's going to get out in less than a year. And she will want to see you.”

“I don't care.”

“Look, she's got her problems, and we all know what they are, but she does love you.”

“No, she doesn't.”

“Of course she does,” I said.

“If you love someone, you don't do things like that, so that you'll be sent away from them. You do things so you can stay together. It was her fault that she left us. And I'm happier now.”

“Hmm,” I said.

She looked away, unhappily, out the window. So I just looked straight ahead, concentrating on driving.

It was like that for awhile. Then I thought I heard her say, “So let's get a cup of coffee.”

I was startled. Angie doesn't drink coffee. “You really want a coffee?” I asked.

“Huh? What?” she said.

“Did you . . . oh, never mind,” I said, puzzled. I checked the radio. It was off.

My mind was playing tricks on me. Then I heard myself saying, inside my head, “There's a Barnes & Noble off the next exit. They have lattés and all that stuff. How about that?” I answered myself, reflexively, “No there isn't,” because there wasn't one off of that exit. “It's hard to know if you're being followed on a freeway,” was the next line, and I realized my mind had drifted off into the memory of my ride with Manny, leaving the fortress of stone, “Straight line, everybody zooming along.”

It had to have been my subconscious cuing, because when I looked purposefully in my rearview mirror, I saw that there was a dark blue Ford Explorer about eight cars back. It's a pretty common car. No reason to assume that it was the same as the one that had followed us then.

But I thought I better find out.

I checked. Angie had her seat belt on. Angie always has her seat belt on. She's good in that way, as well as many others. “I'm gonna pull off this next exit here,” I said.

“Okay, sure,” she said.

I had my cruise control set on seventy-six miles per hour, as a lot of the drivers did. I accelerated some, not like Manny could've in the monster Mercedes, but enough to see if they pulled out of the seventy-six-mile-per-hour club too.

“She can't take me back, can she?” Angie asked abruptly.

“No, baby, she can't,” I said. But I knew better. If Jeanette found a sugar daddy with a pile of money for lawyers, or a gung ho woman's group to back her, and she fought for her “natural mother's rights,” it would be a hell of a battle. And an expensive one. If CTM turned against me, especially Jerry Hobson with his nasty, blackmailing, evidence-planting tricks, it would be one we could certainly lose. I was almost glad that I had another problem on my hands to distract me.

I wanted to make an abrupt move and cross directly from the inside lane to the exit ramp, forcing them to show their hand. Or not, and turn out to be just another couple of guys on their way to the
mall in their SUV. I kept an eye on my side and rearview mirrors, and at the last moment, I yanked the wheel and cut off a gray Toyota Tundra—the driver leaned on his horn and gave me the finger—cut in tight behind a dented Hyundai sedan, and then steered hard onto the exit ramp, my tires complaining and threatening to cut loose as we went into the curve.

“Don't ever drive like this,” I said to Angie.

But she was shrieking, “Dad, what are you doing?”

“Hang on, baby,” I said, trying to slow down without provoking a skid.

There was a light at the end of the ramp. It was red. I pushed down on the brakes hard enough to come to a semistop. I looked back toward the start of the ramp. The Explorer was charging into it, way too fast for normal driving.

The motherfuckers were after me. With Angie there.

“Dad, Dad, what are you doing?” Angie said.

I was overreacting, being cowboy stupid, with Angie in the car. I could have found out that we were being followed without the drama. So what if someone was following me? What would they find out? That I was taking my daughter to a doctor's office and dropping in at a big downtown law firm?

“You want an ice cream?” I asked, like I'd pulled off with a reason.

It was pretty thin, but she said, “Sure.”

I looked around. It was one of those nowhere exits for development that would surely come. Probably built because someone politically connected owned the surrounding acres. But so far, it didn't even have a gas station and convenience store. There were some signs up, one to an industrial area—refineries we could see in the distance—and I knew that there was a development a couple of miles behind, but I didn't want to double back. If we'd kept going toward the city, the next exit would've been eight miles ahead, Kavanaugh Golf Club Estates, a very expensive subdivision built around one of our more exclusive golf clubs, with the river running through it. If the road in front of us stayed roughly parallel with the highway, that's where we'd end up, and there was a high-end mall with a Häagen-Dazs and a Godiva Chocolates and other nice places for treats, so I turned left.

The Explorer was almost up to us, and when we turned, it followed.

The road started veering to the west, away from the main road, into the choppy scrubland, clumps of salt grass and scattered ephedra in the stony, sandy soil.

“Do you know where you're going?” Angie asked.

“I'm kinda guessing,” I said.

“Mmm,” she said.

“Mmm, yourself.”

A mile later, the Explorer still behind me, the paving ended, and we were on a sandy track. The area is full of them. Lots and lots of nothing in front of us, and more nothing on either side of us, and Angie asked, “Are you lost?”

“Well, yeah, sort of,” I said. “Don't tell Mom.”

“I won't.”

I glanced up in the rearview, thinking that maybe I should turn around. The Explorer was no longer hanging back and keeping a tail. It was coming up fast, very fast. In a moment it was practically on my bumper, and then it pulled to the left, like it was going to pass me. I wondered what they were up to, if they would flag me down or cut me off.

As it came up alongside, I looked over, and the passenger-side window was sliding down. I saw one of the two guys that I'd seen in the prison when we'd met with Ahmad. The one with thin hair and acne pits. He was looking back at me. And then I saw the gun come up. I reflexively reached out for Angie and shoved her down and stomped my foot on the brake at the same time. They zoomed past.

I turned hard right, off the road, into the scrub and the sand. I was hoping to circle back onto the road and run the other way, back where we'd come from. Could I outrun them? In Manny's car, sure, but in my seven-year-old Cherokee? Who knew what they had under the hood.

We were bouncing like mad over the bumpy ground, and I was wondering what the hell I should do. I've been a cop. I know the worst thing in the world is to run from cops. It makes them excited
and scared, and worst of all, righteous. “He ran” opens the door to just about anything. But if what Ahmad said was true, and what Manny said was true, they could just grab me and say I was aiding and abetting terrorists or some damn thing, and they could take me away, and I would never even get my one phone call. Besides, they hadn't identified themselves as police. They'd identified themselves as someone who wanted to shoot me. “Jesus,” I prayed silently, “please protect us. I have my daughter with me.”

I unclipped my key ring from the ignition key. “Angie,” I ordered, “unhook your belt.” She had to think I was nuts, bouncing over the dirt and rocks like we were, and she didn't move. “Do it! Do it now!”

“Yes, Daddy,” she said.

“Take these.” I thrust the keys at her. “The one that looks like a bicycle lock. Crawl in back, open the tool box. Come on, go! Go!”

“Okay,” she said, taking the keys. She didn't sound frightened. Kind of excited even.

I concentrated on the driving, trying to get some distance without wrecking us or flipping. At least they weren't gaining.

“You there? You there?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me when it's open.”

Time passed—three, four, five, ten heartbeats. “Got it.”

“There's a vest in there. Put on the vest.”

The bastards were getting up close. I shoved the pedal down. We accelerated way too fast and got airborne. I heard a “Whoa!” from the back, while I was yelling “Hang on!” We came down with a thud and almost bottomed out. I was grateful not to hear anything break underneath.